this is how i am, and you are
by Tragedy Tay
Summary: This is how it feels. SS.


title: **this is how i am, and you are**

summary: this is how it feels. SS.

rating: pg-13

oooooo

_we ride the line between twist and crime_

_it seems plain like day as the years go by_

_that this is how i am and you are_

_and it's real life._

_-The Southland_

oooooooooo

"You're a little slut."

She breathes, and points a trembling finger at the little girl sitting crosslegged on the sofa, watching The Little Mermaid and clutching an American Girl doll. 

"A little fucking slut. You'll end up pregnant and then you'll end up here and alone and just like your mother. A whore."

The girl is confused, she doesn't know what those words even mean, and that just makes her angrier for some reason.

"You're just like your mother, breaking your father's heart and fucking everyone who walks by." She slurs every word, and grabs the little girl's arm, wrenching her knobby shoulder as she tries to walk away.

She's lost and confused and the words sink into her, even as she tries not to let them.

But she looks just like her mother, and she loves her mother, she misses her mother.

It's like sand from the beach, but she can't wash it away. 

It sticks. It ingrains. It stains.

This is how it feels when Summer is alone with her stepmother.

ooooo

It's like playing Tetris. Without the difficulty, without the flashing lights and everything. And he could make a joke about it, but that's exactly what it's like.

Like pieces falling into place, and always making room for more. Like he is skillfully guiding each segment, each moment. Like the easiest game of Tetris he's ever played, like her body is the controller. And he knows exactly where to touch her, where to put his lips, when to shift and when to smile and when to whisper into her ear so that she'll smile back. 

And when to stroke his fingers over her stomach and tell her everything that pops into his mind in that low breath that makes her lips curl up in the most perfect way.

That's his high score.

Every single piece is always falling, and it's never stopping, but this isn't stressful.

He still ends up sweaty though.

This is how it feels when he touches Summer Roberts.

Her letter is longer.

Pages and pages folded over. Scratchy letters on each side of the paper. Words and words.

_"This isn't your fault."  
_

_"This isn't because of you."_

_"This has nothing to do with you, Summer, I swear."_

Goddamnit, Cohen. Call it what it is. He's leaving. Forever. He's never coming back, so it's forever. It's not because of her, and she'll never see him again, will she?

She can't control her breathing. She can't control her thoughts, the only thing she can control is if she finishes the letter or not, the half-novel he's left her, and it's all he's left her and he's left her.

Ryan already left, and he can't just avoid his parents anywhere he goes, so what did he really leave?

Just her.

Ryan is gone already. This changes nothing, so it can't be about him.

Her chest aches from trying to breathe. They all leave her.

But oh god this hurts. Oh god.

The letter is the feel of a lead weight. Like it will anchor her to this one spot on his carpet forever.

This is how it feels when he leaves her.

_Like she's sinking._

oooooooo

His head is about to explode and he's freezing his ass off and his hands are throbbing and pretty much numb.

So he can't be blamed when he thinks she's a hallucination.

Especially when she's kissing him, after mumbling an answer that he has no hope of hearing, the blood is practically filling his eyeballs and he hears things like he's fifty miles underwater.

Why the fuck would she be kissing him?

So this can't be real.

It's like he's seeing unicorns, like he's found a genie, like he's Luke Skywalker, like he's just been offered a dream deal.

He's seriously afraid he'll throw up all over her before she gets him down, but then at least he'll know this is happening.

He just lets it pulsate through him, along with the blood that's still flowing through his face and hands. It pounds through his body, the realization.

_This is happening._

This is how it feels when she comes back for him.

oooooooo

She is so fucking stuck.

She's in a haze. She's going through the same motions every single day, and she knows Seth is worried, and Taylor is worried, and her dad maybe. But Seth has Ryan too, and Taylor is gone, and her dad doesn't know her. Seth can't be here all the time, and he's the only one whose eyes she can bring herself to meet.

She was one half of a pair, always and forever, and that's why she needs him. So she still can be, even if it's not the same. She isn't meant to be alone, she needs someone else. She has always had someone else, and she's never learned how to truly be alone, and not have someone in reach. She went from Marissa to Seth, Marissa to Seth, Seth to Taylor, Seth and Taylor and Marissa at once, and now she just has the one.

Seth has been more important for awhile. She knows that too.

But that does not fucking matter right now, when her friend is nothing but ashes and streaks of blood on the highway. Nothing matters but that she is gone, and Summer is here, and what the fuck does she do with herself?

So she does nothing. Waits for someone to make her leave her bed. Waits for Seth to drag her downstairs to eat, back up for a shower.

She goes through the motions, and she's stuck in the loop that is endless as far as she allows herself to see.

She just feels like less of herself when Coop finally leaves.

Because they all go.

Always.

ooooooooooo

He's worried about what will happen to them now.

Last time they did the college thing, it didn't work so well. She left. He told her to, and he wasn't any kind of mad, but she'd still gone away on that bus, and he'd been alone, and he wasn't intent on that happening again.

Last time, she broke away from him. Her friend had died, and she was groping for anything that would take her away from that. But she'd stuck with it, and he wasn't sure they could do it again. And he couldn't lose her again. He couldn't let her pull away anymore, he was so tired of struggling to hold on.

But now she knew.

"I'll always pick you," she told him, and he just gazed at her, at her freckled and sunburnt nose, her hair that was as light as it ever got because of the summer sunshine. She smelled like chlorine and like the first summer he ever knew her, back when all they had was the summer, it seemed like it was charmed. But it kept going, _years and years_, and now here they were, and she was just lying under his arm, basically pledging herself to him.

"You will always come first, Seth Cohen, and don't you ever forget that." She was looking at him like he should know this already, and that's what finally settled it in his mind. Even if he was nineteen.

Now he knows. When want becomes need, when she can say things like this without apology, when he nods like it's the most natural thing in the world, he knows.

This is how it feels when he knows he has to marry her.


End file.
